Sick of boring, preachy movies that drag on for hours? Film critic BRIAN VINER reviews seven Hollywood masterpieces released in this month 50 years ago

Fifty years have passed since Britt Ekland, above, bared all in the classic folk-horror film The Wicker Man. 

Or so audiences in December 1973 were led to believe. ‘But I’ve got an **** like a ski slope,’ she protested, when told her backside would be exposed to the camera, so director Robin Hardy obligingly hired a comely ‘bottom double’.

Despite that directorial sleight of hand, or rather haunch, The Wicker Man was a thrillingly daring film. It is a little dated now but still compellingly creepy and, in parts, properly scary.

Edward Woodward played a devoutly Christian policeman, Neil Howie, sent to look for a missing girl on a remote Hebridean island where the locals, including the pub landlord’s flirtatious daughter Willow (Ekland), were in thrall to the sinister laird (Christopher Lee).

Lee, who liked to claim that he had appeared in more films than anyone, always said The Wicker Man was the pick of them. So did Woodward, despite his character’s ghastly end.

Horrifyingly, the islanders ended up burning Howie as a sacrifice to their pagan gods. But half a century later, the creativity and originality that yielded The Wicker Man has gone up in smoke.

Nothing illustrates this better than a comparison of the remarkable list of films released in December 1973 – among them The Wicker Man, The Sting, The Exorcist, Magnum Force, Serpico, Papillon and Richard Lester’s extravagant The Three Musketeers – with this month’s lacklustre output, the usual dispiriting diet of sequels, prequels and superheroes.

The Wicker Man was first shown in public on December 5, 1973, and lasted just 87 minutes. That economy of story-telling is something from which modern film- makers could learn, not that most of them show the slightest inclination.

The most experienced and respected directors are the main miscreants these days, evidently because nobody dares tell them to rein it in. 

Martin Scorsese’s monumental Killers Of The Flower Moon, which was released in October and chronicled a series of murders that took place over several years in 1920s Oklahoma, was very good but seemed to unfold in real time.

Sir Ridley Scott, who as a TV advertising man learned how to tell stories in less than a minute (his famous 1973 Hovis commercial, featuring a delivery boy on a bike, lasted 47 seconds), now cannot tell a story in less than two and a half hours. His last three films – 2021’s The Last Duel and House Of Gucci, and his latest epic Napoleon – together last almost eight hours.

The brevity of The Wicker Man on the other hand made it perfect for a double bill, another long-gone pleasure of going to the pictures. It was paired with Don’t Look Now, Nic Roeg’s classic psychological horror film starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, which had come out in October.

Without doubt, 1973 was a vintage year for cinema. Two of the year’s other enduring joys were A Touch Of Class, a romantic comedy starring Glenda Jackson and George Segal, and The Way We Were, a romantic drama, with Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand. Today, just the titles alone feel like wistful comments on the quality of movies then compared with now.

It wasn’t until December 1973, however, that the year’s real cinematic whoppers were unveiled: The Sting and The Exorcist. The Sting came out in the US on Christmas Day and reunited director George Roy Hill with Redford and Paul Newman, the stars who’d teamed up so triumphantly four years earlier in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid.

It was an original story about a pair of Chicago con artists who outsmarted a menacing Irish mob boss, played by Robert Shaw. Everything about it was a delight, right down to the jaunty ragtime theme tune which re-popularised the work of Scott Joplin.

Yet the screenwriter, David S Ward, was a young film school graduate, not yet 30.

He had been researching another film about pickpockets but, deciding that conmen were more compelling, concocted a story idea and sold it to producer Tony Bill even before the script was written

Eventually, the film won seven Oscars, including Best Original Screenplay for Ward. It is nigh-on impossible now to imagine Hollywood taking such a chance on an unknown, first-time screenwriter. But producers were braver then and far less risk-averse.

Moreover, Ward not only had the satisfaction of nursing his own story to the screen but also got to see his characters Johnny Hooker and Henry Gondorff played by two of the era’s mightiest stars, around whom a fierce debate raged.

While teenage girls in the 1970s were compelled to choose between Donny Osmond and David Cassidy, their mothers all had an opinion on which was dishier: Redford or Newman? Either way, within a year The Sting had become the fourth highest-grossing film in history behind Gone With The Wind, The Sound Of Music and a picture that, incredibly, had come out in the US just a day later.

The Exorcist, the story of an 11-year-old girl, played by Linda Blair, possessed by a powerful demon, was a phenomenon. Its distributor, Warner Brothers, did not have particularly high hopes for a supernatural horror film without any major stars, and it was initially released in only 24 cinemas. But word quickly spread that it was the most terrifying movie ever made.

Audiences queued round the block to see it, sometimes in freezing temperatures, lured by reports of people fainting and vomiting during some of the most startling scenes.

Director William Friedkin went to extreme lengths to make the film, even hiding guns on the set which he could fire unexpectedly to elicit genuine shock from his cast.

Star Ellen Burstyn called him ‘a maniac’. But he was rewarded for his maniacal behaviour. Soon, his film was breaking box office records everywhere.

Unlike The Sting, The Exorcist was inspired by a book, the 1971 novel of the same name by William Peter Blatty, who also wrote the screenplay. Other books of varying fame inspired three other memorable films that came out half a century ago this month. The most lavish of them was The Three Musketeers, an epic swashbuckler which had originally been mooted, improbably enough, as a vehicle for The Beatles.

Instead, in Lester’s rollicking version of the venerable Alexandre Dumas novel, Michael York played d’Artagnan, with Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay and Richard Chamberlain in the title roles. Faye Dunaway played the scheming Milady de Winter, with Raquel Welch as the winsome (and buxom) Constance, Charlton Heston as Cardinal Richelieu and the ubiquitous Christopher Lee playing the Count de Rochefort. Further down the cast list there were roles for Spike Milligan and Roy Kinnear. The Three Musketeers was a hoot, and a hit.

Looking back at that remarkable array of new releases in December 1973, what is most eye-catching is the tremendous quality of film-making across so many varieties of style and subject matter.

Sidney Lumet’s Serpico, adapted from a book chronicling the real-life exploits of a New York City cop who exposed corruption in the force, was intense, intelligent and altogether unforgettable, with a hugely charismatic lead performance by Al Pacino.

Papillon, co-written by veteran screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, whose credits included the eternal classics Roman Holiday and Spartacus, was another hit.

Starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, it was adapted from the bestselling book of the same name by Henri Charriere, a small-time French criminal who spent years plotting to escape from various penal colonies.

Magnum Force, the follow-up to Dirty Harry (1971) starring Clint Eastwood as renegade San Francisco cop Harry Callahan, came out alongside The Exorcist on Boxing Day.

It survived a lambasting by prominent film critic Pauline Kael, who was no fan of Eastwood’s.

‘He isn’t an actor, so one could hardly call him a bad actor,’ she wrote. ‘He’d have to do something before we could consider him bad at it. And acting isn’t required of him in Magnum Force.’

Maybe, maybe not. Whatever, the film was another box office smash, which rode a further storm of bad publicity a few months later when three hostages taken during a robbery at a hi-fi shop in small-town Utah were forced to drink corrosive drain cleaner. It was a method of torture their assailants had picked up from a nasty scene in Magnum Force, which they had watched repeatedly.

Still, with or without Dirty Harry Callahan, December 1973 must surely go down as one of the classiest and most prolific months in film history.

Another pair of wonderful films released that month were Woody Allen’s gloriously nutty sci-fi comedy Sleeper, about the owner of a health food store (Allen) who wakes up in a police state after being cryogenically frozen for two centuries, and The Last Detail, Hal Ashby’s superb comedy-drama about a couple of ebullient sailors (Jack Nicholson and Otis Young) assigned to escort a timid young court-martialled recruit (Randy Quaid) to naval prison.

That film, which features what for my money is still one of Nicholson’s greatest screen performances, went on to be nominated unsuccessfully for three Oscars.

Needless to add, voters of the Academy Awards honouring the best films of 1973 were spoilt for choice. The Best Picture nominees were The Sting, The Exorcist, A Touch Of Class, American Graffiti and Cries And Whispers, by the great Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman… and the winner was The Sting.

So a caper movie pipped a horror film, a rom-com, a rites-of-passage story and a darkly profound Scandinavian period drama, all brilliant in their very contrasting ways.

At the ceremony, on April 2, 1974, just after praising the ‘motion picture industry’ for providing ‘matchless’ entertainment at a time of alarming global turbulence, host David Niven was interrupted by a male streaker, who ran across the stage flashing, among other things, the peace sign.

The ineffably debonair Niven was unfazed. While the naked peace protester was detained backstage he waited for the uproar to die down, then brought the house down by remarking, in his cut-glass British accent, that ‘the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings’.

Half a century later, alas, it is the movie industry itself showing us its shortcomings, by all too often failing, at another time of alarming global turbulence, to offer us that matchless entertainment of which Niven spoke.

As the Mail’s film critic, I don’t subscribe to the common view that there’s never anything worth watching in the cinema these days. It’s simply not true.

But looking at this month’s releases, which include the try-hard but rather flaccid Willy Wonka origin story Wonka, Meg Ryan’s irritating and ill-conceived rom-com What Happens Later, Taika Waititi’s dreadful miskick of a football comedy Next Goal Wins, a French language version of The Three Musketeers that is nowhere near as much fun as the 1973 film, and of course the obligatory dose of superhero antics in Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that, cinematically speaking, we were very much better off the way we were.